Paging Stephen Poole

Heya, Stephen. Have you heard of the Windux operating system? It's the brainchild of a development group whose purpose was to make Linux every bit as user friendly as Windows. I have no trouble with the clear superiority of Linux on several levels, but have always been put off by the difficulty of using and learning a new O/S and GUI. Here's a link to their website: http://www.windux.com/ where it says,

Windux is a development project started by an experienced team of linux developers, network administrators, and webmasters, who have come together to design a line of personal computers, servers, and software all based upon Linux with all the functionality of your common windows desktop machine. The windows desktop monopoly has fostered a new and viable open source alternative that is intuitive

Answers

The problem with Unix has been throughput. When someone
has been around long enough to know the verbal commands,
they leave.

The problem with Windows has been with the hardware. We,
primarily, do graphics analysis. It is very slow [I'm sure that you
know why]. And as far as I can tell, Photoshop is completely
incompatible with 2000 pro or other NT based systems [haven't
tried XP].

That leaves me with Mac 9.1. My software is mostly custom and
isn't available for OS 10. So, here I be; stuck in a time warp. ;o)))

Hi, Z. Actually, all I needed to know I learned in kindergarten:
Windows Bad, resource hog, riddled with virii trap doors. Linux
Good, stable, safe, FREE. I've never used a system with a Unix-
derived O/S. I'm an old person. Like millions of lazy, decadent
Americans, I hate the idea of learning a new GUI. Thus, my
interest.

Yeah, I've heard of it, but haven't tried it. There's also Linux for
Windows (the very idea of which strikes me as odd -- its sort of like,
"Ford Motor for Chevy, get yerz t'day!"). I'll take a look at it.

My first computer was a TI handheld, a programmable calculator. Cost
several hundred dollars and stored the programs on little magnetic
strips, and you programmed it in cryptic numeric codes. This was in
the 70's. I wrote several engineering programs for it.

My point is that, like Z, I've been messing with these things since
256 bytes of RAM was considered a gracious plenty, though I came up
from the low end and worked up.

I can be objective about Linux because I'm not really emotionally
attached to any of these operating systems. It's got some real
strengths, the biggest being price and stability. It's already making
a *serious* dent in the WinTel monopoly, and Microsoft is, quite
frankly, running scared from the whole Open Source movement in
general.

But Linux ain't gonna do it by being "me, too." One of my complaints
is that Mandrake, Red Hat, et. al. are trying so hard to emulate
Windows themselves that at times, it almost gets in the way.

I'd seen X a few years ago when I was doing contract work for a friend
back in NC. It looked fine to me (reminded me of OS/2); why the newest
versions of KDE and Gnome are so determined to emulate the taskbar,
Start menu and other stuff from Windows escapes me. Instead of
imitating, they should *innovate.*

My first computer was a TI handheld, a programmable calculator. Cost
several hundred dollars and stored the programs on little magnetic
strips, and you programmed it in cryptic numeric codes.

Hey, I remember those. A friend of mine had one. I loved the whirring
motor as the little magnetic card slid in. He had a games card with
Lunar Lander on it.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Pocket Computer. A calculator on
steroids, it had a full alphanumeric keypad and a 1-line 24 character
display. You could program it in BASIC until you used up the 1.7 K of
memory it had. Then you could use the cassette adapter to CSAVE your
program to tape. It was cool.

I am also baffled at why a system that has boasted "long file
names," so to speak, almost since the beginning insists on
continuing to use cryptic names like "emacs" and "awk" and
"bash." :)

My theory is you can account for it entirely through 3 facts: 1) UNIX
was written entirely by C programmers. 2) C programmers hate typing
above all other things. 3) They also have an incredibly high pain
threshold for memorizing cryptic, compressed, convoluted symbology.

Yeah, that whirring magnetic strip reader was cool, if noisy. Hard to
work late at night without waking someone up, if you had to read in
some data. :)

This is just the first computer I *owned*, mind you. Radio has been
using computers and control systems since before Intel invented the
microprocessor, so it was natural that I'd be interested in them.

Shoot, our insurance agency had a Remington *mechanical* calculator
that weighed a ton and took up to two minutes to work a complex
division problem. It was noisy, too. :)

There are a few other projects that might catch your interest, then.
Some folks that I used to hang out with in the Dr. Dobbs forum on
Compuserve have been working at cloning the Win32 API, for example.
Their work could lead to the first real clone of Windows.

I might check out Windux this weekend. Shoot, I've already got several
operating systems installed on this poor machine; why not one more? :)

I got involved with Unix to a very limited extent in the early 90s.
I surmised that the creators of Unix were trying to keep it a
priesthood, and that Exhibit A was the perfectly awful text editor
that Unix had. It was called "vi", if memory serves. You didn't use
the arrow keys, you got into move mode and used a diamond of regular
keys, etc. I felt there was no excuse for that kind of crap.

I've had to dive back into Unix in a big way lately, as I have become
an Oracle DBA. Our Senior DBA tells me I've got to use vi. Only
good reason to use it in my opinion is in an emergency when you have
no other access to the box other than through the console. Then, of
course, you'll have to make heavy use of the man pages. I'll do
anything I can to avoid vi. We use Xmanager which has a nice text
editor built into it. If I don't have that I'll ftp the darn file
over to a PC, edit it, and ftp it back rather than dealing with vi.
Old programmers will remember there are worse creatures than vi,
edlin for instance.

Edlin was a piece of crap in its time as well. That was what we had
to use as an editor on our VAX based systems and those old PDP-11 and
11/04's we used to use in the factory... Thank god for new equipment!

I was fond of edlin, lol. My very first lesson on my IBM-PC was
autoexec.bat, and edlin was the magic key into it. So I was pretty
thrilled (at the time). I had a good mentor and with a good mentor
you can be enthusiastic about anything!

You'd have more experience than me at that sort of thing, but just for
the record: in Linux, anyway, "vi" is still around. And yes, it
reminds me of something from the 50's.

(1850's. Maybe.[g])

Mandrake had enough sense to include a few other editors in the
package, though, including one that I really like (can't remember the
name at the moment).

Anita, one of the nice things about the Mandrake and RedHat
distributions is that they include tons of different software. Several
different multimedia players, several different editors, three or four
Web browsers (that I've discovered so far -- there may be more!).

I am really impressed with Star Office. It lacks a few features that
Microsoft's product offers, but considering the price, it's amazing.
You *can* read and edit anything sent to you in Word or Excel format.

I first migrated onto the PC when I was a trainer at Heilig Meyers
back in the 80's. The people in the PC support department there loved
edlin; I hated it. We had a word processor called "WatchWord" that
would output plain-text ASCII, and I used it instead.

(Or just entered stuff at the DOS prompt with a "copy con," followed
by a CTRL-Z when I was done. Had to be careful, though ...)

Stephen, thanks for the answer. Anywhere online that I could take a
look at what those folks are doing with Win32 API? I've used
StarOffice, and agree it's wonderfully functional for professional or
personal use. And, at $0 - $35, it's damn impressive.

OK, I looked at Windux. It's just another effort to make Linux easier
to install and use, no different (IMNHO) from Mandrake, SuSE and Red
Hat. The package is very similar to the Mandrake distribution that I'm
using.

The key difference, from what I could tell, is that WinDux wants to
concentrate on releasing machines with Linux preloaded, much as
Windows is pre-installed on most PCs now.

Their Web site makes me nervous, too. I clicked on the two buttons for
their discussion forum and got 404'd each time; I never saw the forum.
That doesn't impress.

Nor did it impress me when I visited Mandrake's site and they were
discussion ways to make the company profitable -- including donations.

If you want to try Linux, here's my honest opinion and a few random
thoughts.

1. Make sure you have plenty of hard drive space and RAM. I bought a
30 gig drive and 128 Meg of RAM; I partitioned 8 of the drive for
Windows 98 and the remaining 20-22 for Linux. If your drive is already
partitioned entirely for Windows, you may have a little work to do. If
you have the $$$, easiest just to buy another drive.

2. Get Mandrake or RedHat. Get the *latest* distribution (8.1 on
Mandrake, as of this writing). Go ahead and spring for the CDs; I
saw the base distribution for $30 at CompUsa. But *be warned*: read
the label carefully! Check that version number! Some of these stores
keep the older distributions in stock long after they've been
superceded!

3. As long as you have a reasonably standard PC, it'll install and
recognize most of your hardware - especially if your machine is 1-2
years old (as is mine -- an AMD 350Mhz). Better yet, the installer
will arrange a boot manager so that you can choose between Linux and
Windows (I still use Windows for DOS games[g]).

4. You will have to enter some Geek stuff to get Linux to work, for
example, with the Web. But the manuals show you how to get all of the
info you need from the "My Computer : Control Panel : System" folder
under Windows.

5. On my system, the boot time is about the same as Windows NT; it's
about 3 times as fast as NT's. The KDE X-windows session itself
appears to run faster than Windows 98's desktop (and it *screams* past
NT [g]).

6. Having Windows on a separate partition gives you time to get
familiar with Linux, without losing the ability to do what you like.
I'm slowly but surely learning where everything is.

7. Drawbacks: there's still a lot of Geek stuff in Linux, like the
aforementioned cryptic file names, unfamiliar folder layout (Linux
makes a "folder" for everything, including processes, hardware,
etc.). On a single-user machine, Linux acts like a single-station
network, with you as the single logged-on user. That takes a little
getting used to.

X-Windows, KDE desktop: the fonts and desktop are a bit
unfamiliar-looking to Windows users (though not quite so much to MacOS
adherents).

All in all, though, it's a worthwhile move. If you're a developer, you
will go wild discovering all the goodies they throw in *FOR FREE* --
like a top-notch C++ compiler with complete development environment.

(NASM, the assembler included in the package, annoys me a bit and
strikes me as limited, but that's only because I'm so used to MASM
6.xx and have been spoiled by it.)

Star Office, as mentioned, works great, it *IS* Office2000 compatible,
and you will very quickly get used to it. (If only it had my Help
Kitty. :(

Stephpen, thank you! I missed this earlier today and didn't realize
you'd given an in-depth and informative response to my questions.
It's exactly the geek stuff that worries me most about Linux. But, I
may be working myself up to biting the bullet. Windoze, in
all its iterations, including 2000 and XP, is just so darn
annoying! There is just no excuse acceptable to this consumer
for Micro$oft to continue allowing their software to be a hacker's
playground. Or, for all their SP's.

After all this time, why
can't they get it right??!!?? Bloaty, Buggy, Booby-trapped. If I
wanted all that, I wouldn't have divorced my ex!

Your quandry is simple, start using Apple hardware and OS, sure it's not totally worry free but compared to my PC buds I
have been 99.9% stress free.If you want the stability of Linux and an easy, user friendly interface the Mac is THE only way
to go.

I warned everyone who'd listen (all three of my fans) about three
years ago that the day that Microsoft started concentrating solely on
the NT codebase, that would do it for me.

Well, for all practical purposes, they've done just that with XP. To
me, it's also VERY ominous that Microsoft's Web site is essentially
saying that they will no longer support 95 or 98 after this year. They
are abandoning the (relatively) simple 95/98/ME codebase in favor of
the bloated, slow and needlessly complex NT model.

I mean, let's be fair here: for a home user's desktop system, Linux is
probably overkill, too -- but not so much so as NT.

The straw that breaks the camel's back, though, is that Microsoft is
*seriously* considering doing nothing but OS *subscriptions* in the
future -- in other words, you don't just buy a copy of ME or XP and be
done with it; you must subscribe to continual upgrades. When your
subscription runs out, you will no longer have an operating system
unless you renew it.

And the hell of it is, I can't see the logical conclusion that the MS corporate people are gaming for, it's allmost to see just
how much marketshare they can lose.Is Bill that stupid? or just that arrogant?

Step away from the windows box, away from the darkside and let the Mac force be with you : )

One of the first public letters that Gates ever wrote was a screed
decrying the fact that a few people had made what he considered
"illegal copies" of Microsoft's BASIC, way back in the 70's. The man
has *always* looked for any way to leverage the last possible nickle
out of *anything* that he did.

Microsoft didn't get into the Web just for the Web's sake, or
introduce IE just to "get" Netscape (though that was certainly a
motivation). A couple of Seattle reporters quoted him as saying that
they wanted to have all e-business vector through MSN -- especially
banking -- and then, said Gates, "[expletive deleted], we'll make the
money."

Gate's stated goal is for Microsoft to be the only software that ever
runs on any computer anywhere. They have consistently worked toward
that goal since day one, slowly, patiently and -- give credit where
due -- brilliantly and ruthlessly.

I had a subscription to the MS developer's net a few years ago. It so
happened that there was another developer named Stephen M. Poole who
worked for Hewlett Packard in California. The mailing program at
Microsoft decided to consolidate us and stop sending two subscriptions
to two different addresses. I never did get the last part of my
subscription, no matter how I argued with them. Because the company
that purchased my subscription lost the receipt, nothing I said or did
would change their minds.

Sure, every business wants to maximize profits, but Microsoft takes it
to ridiculous extremes. My Bro is the business guy in the Poole
family, and he'll point out that most businesses will accept *some*
"slippage" and loss as part of the cost of doing business.
Sometimes you give people freebies to keep them as customers.

Not Microsoft! They use their dominant position to dominate. Period.
In any way that they can, leveraging every last conceivable penny from
any business transaction that they do.

Of course, you *do* know that Microsoft owns part of Apple now, don't
you? Sigh.

Don't let anything happen to you before I'm done with the transition
[if I even decide to MAKE the transition, Stephen.] I've been E-
mailing with my son on this thought. HE'D also like to create a
Linux system, but his fears are much like mine...He's afraid he'll
screw things up so badly that he'll be computer-less! The horror!

I've only got a 3 gig 'chine, so it looks like I'm gonna have to
purchase more storage no matter WHAT I do. [I remember when 3 gig
was a LOT!] Rich mentioned a while back that storage was pretty
cheap these days. I'm not a hardware person. I've never dealt
with "inserting storage cards" or whatever. I can deal with any
software as long as I have a manual, but my only strength is that I
can read.

My son is more computer savvy and may be coming after Christmas.
Maybe we could find a sale then on storage and he could help me with
the install. I'm sure he'd feel more comfortable "testing his
skills" on MY machine rather than his. BTW, his theory is that IBM
and the Linux folks are tag-teaming in an attempt to create a market
outside of Microsoft.

What's this I hear about a Windex operating system? Why, Windex
doesn't need an operating system more complicated than the spray cap
it comes with. I just can't believe that people never seem to stop
trying to fix something when it isn't broke. You know, I think
people should stand up and protest all these fancy highfalutin new
gimmicks that are supposed to improve window cleaning in every which
way -- that all these "inventors" should just take a break from it
all and just be happy with everything we DO have for cleaning
windows. In fact I have a petition here that I hope all of you who
won't stand for.....

Okay, Stephen and cap, here's the deal with Apple as far as I know.
Polar opposite of Anita, my software/programming knowledge is nearly
zip, but I LOVE hardware tweaks and tinkers. Like, when the
Soundblaster Audiology card came out...gotta have that! Or,
Seagate's fluid-dynamic bearings technology...Oooo...MINE! With a
PC, just pop out the old, pop in the new. There are the occasional
driver issues with Windoze, but never insurmountable. Some of the
tweaking ease is probably lost with Linux, but not impossible.
Doesn't Apple use proprietary hardware? Please correct me if that's
wrong.

"Lindows, (www.lindows.com) has a name that in itself is genius.
It's software that combines Linux and Windows without violating any
trademark or copyright--although I bet Microsoft will sue at some
point. The concept is to make a cheap OS that runs both Linux and
Windows code, but that looks and runs like Windows. The Lindows
concept was dreamed up by MP3.com entrepreneur Michael Robertson, and
is encountering skepticism. Nobody is taking it too seriously except
me. I think Lindows might fly if it can conquer one simple roadblock,
and that's running Microsoft Office 97, 2000, and XP. If Lindows can
run these versions of Office, then look out below. Bombs away."---PC
Magazine

What makes it appear that it might have some legs as a Windoze
contender is that Micro$oft is suing the company for trademark
infringement on their name, something that Gates hasn't bothered
doing with the other pretenders to the throne, such as Windux.
Hmmm...

An even better example is X-Windows. That's much closer to an outright
infringement than "Windux." As a result, I'm not so sure Microsoft has
a good case. Ask Bayer about what happened to them when they failed to
adequately defend the name "Aspirin." :)

Microsoft has tried to ignore Linux in the past, thinking that it
would be a flash in the pan that would go away eventually. I suspect
that's the reason they never said anything about X-Windows -- and it
would be difficult for them to press a case on that now.

But since Linux has become a real threat -- especially in their bread
and butter business, pre-installation on machines leaving the factory
-- they've targeted it for the usual Microsoft treatment.

Have a look at the infamous Halloween
Document sometime; it shows that, by 1998, Microsoft was beginning
to take Linux *VERY* seriously. :)